Conflicting Temperature Data
Submitted by walteraw on October 6, 2009 - 11:29am.
|
|
Your blog host
Walter Winch will blog here regularly on the environment and hopes you’ll join in the discussion. Walter’s opinions are his own and don’t necessarily reflect views of The Kansas City Star.
User login
Syndicate
*yawn*
denial = straw man
Denialism
Who are the "deniers"? I mean, specifically, who are the "deniers"? What are they denying? What is the scientific consensus on climate change? wikipedia provides the following statement attributed to the IPCC:
"An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Beyond this carefully worded statement, consensus quickly fractures into a number of different schools of thought.
Enquiring Minds
'What are they denying?'
Golly, watch the video. It's not difficult, just hit that little triangle thingy and it plays the video and you get to see that deniers are claiming that cool weather is a legit argument against climate change. That's not a hard concept is it? Maybe you should've looked up 'denialism' when you went to Wikipedia. "Denialism "is the refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality. It is an essentially irrational action that withholds validation of a historical experience or event."
"Individuals, or groups who reject propositions on which a scientific or scholarly consensus exists are said to be engaging in denialism when they seek to influence policy processes and outcomes by using rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none."
"The term has been used with "Holocaust denialism", and "AIDS denialism". Other scientific facts and theories underpinning vaccination,climate change, and evolution have also been subject to attacks by people who deny the validity of the underlying science."
Now, no need for the confusion over whether Denial means the same thing as straw man; it doesn't. Deniers aren't denying something beyond the "carefully worded" description the IPCC provided, they are denying the contents of the description, pretty simple to understand, right? Not sure your characterization of what consensus is limited as much as you say, but that's a far more advanced question than you can begin to address until you get some of the basic concepts down.